Los Angeles Apparel is a basics apparel manufacturer and online retailer, passionate about bringing back comfort lines made in the US. The brand is deeply focused on using economic and environmentally-sustainable practices to produce high-quality garments made to last. Its best sellers include bike shorts, crop tanks and bodysuits, created by highly-trained workers in South Central Los Angeles.

LA Apparel makes an ambitious move into  affiliate

April 2020 saw the brand launch its inaugural affiliate program on the ShareASale platform alongside full-service digital marketing agency DMi Partners. It can take months for a brand to properly launch and integrate a new sales channel. However, a major shift in LA Apparel’s core business – impacting everything from its manufacturing priorities to its marketing and customer base – brought affiliate marketing to the foreground of its operation.  

In response to COVID-19, LA Apparel began manufacturing cloth face masks just prior to its launch on ShareASale. Affiliate was deemed a perfect match for promoting the new line, making the rapid implementation of its program both a requirement and an obstacle. The brand gained a taste for the latter after discounting several other platforms that were quoting up-to-two months for the onboarding process.  

ShareASale’s all-hands-on-deck mentality helped LA Apparel become revenue active within 24 hours. Combined with its innovative platform and best-in-class partnership opportunities, the network ensured the brand could start engaging with customers both quickly and effectively.

Leveraging content for immediate impact

To kickstart its affiliate activity and drive results, LA Apparel decided to put faith in content - which speaks volumes about its mission to think and act differently. While many similar cases would have relied on coupon and loyalty sites to incentivize customers and guarantee an early wave of sales, considerations around brand image, time constraints and the general belief in content led to a very different plan of action.

This plan was ultimately determined following a market assessment from DMi, who’s research also noted that due to the financial insecurity surrounding the COVID-19 pandemic, discretionary spending was dropping rapidly. Consumers were doing more research before purchases, so content partners running product reviews and endorsements were extremely valuable, generating more revenue than ever observed.

Building a mass media engagement from the ground  up

LA Apparel wanted to leverage the voice and traffic of major content partners to generate coverage for its new masks as restrictions heightened and face coverings became recommended or mandatory. By utilizing these publishers to target individuals working from home, the brand would tap into a cost-effective method of promotion.

Following a quick and seamless integration on ShareASale, LA Apparel and DMi Partners began work on the content-based strategy to accelerate the new program. Despite the presence of a well-defined plan, the teams would have to meet four very different objectives to succeed:

• Move quickly to avoid a crowded market
• Achieve immediate results through an incentive-free approach
• Target major media outlets for maximum impact
• Use retargeting to convert mask buyers into regular customers

Always aiming high

With a longer timeline, LA Apparel’s campaign could have included mid-tier bloggers and media partners for an extra push. Having an overarching goal of reaching the largest possible audience in a short window of time led to a concerted focus on mass media publishers that could meet the required levels of volume and visibility.  

While the partners were initially hesitant to promote mask-related content due to it being a new and untested quantity, it wasn’t long before the seriousness of COVID-19 and the allure of supporting a US-made product helped LA Apparel remedy their concerns.

Of further benefit was the brand’s above-average conversion rate, demonstrating the likelihood of turning traffic into sales. This confluence of factors proved to be motivation enough to get the first publishers onboard and, following an immediate response from their readers, a snowball effect was observed.

Content: The vehicle for awareness, sales and repeat purchasing

The speed at which DMi and ShareASale were able to bring LA Apparel’s affiliate program from inception to execution meant publishers' product roundups, a key element of LA Apparel's success, only included a handful of other brands vying for consumer attention.

Following an effective activation strategy, the brand secured coverage across 35 high-profile mass media publications including Business Insider, Mashable, Marie Claire, NY Post, Rolling Stone and Women’s Health, among others.  

And in just one month - thanks to the tools, technology and quality of partners available on ShareASale - the LA Apparel affiliate program saw marked results (Fig. 1).

Move and evolve

To round things off, the team’s decision to launch the campaign with velocity proved correct, as a variety of competing mask options flooded the market by May - filling the space and dispersing its revenue. As a result, the team pivoted the affiliate strategy to work-from-home attire, continuing their strong collaboration and applying the mask campaign’s learnings to a completely new venture.